Revisiting arm (32-bits) support? (answer: no)

Since Freedesktop SDK 20.08, the ARM 32-bits platform is no longer supported.

However there is one major platform, which despite not shipping with flatpak installed, is ARM 32-bit. And it’s the Raspberry Pi. And with the Raspberry Pi 400 it touted also as a Personal Computer. I bought one. And it ships with Raspberry Pi OS which is 32-bits (it’s the new name or Raspian, a Debian Buster based armv7hf distribution)

Sadly the official 64-bits OS still isn’t ready. While there are alternatives, we all know that the default setup is usually the one dominating in marketshare, and supporting it is the most user experience.

So I was wondering what it would take to revisit ARM 32-bits support.

All of this was known when it was decided to drop arm support which suggests it wasn’t enough to keep supporting arm 32bit, see https://gitlab.com/freedesktop-sdk/freedesktop-sdk/-/issues/1105 .

Beside it’s relative unpopularity on flathub, arm runner used for doing CI was expensive. It’s now decommissioned and replaced with cheaper and less powerful one to keep it spinning until 19.08 dies.

Side note: flathub forum isn’t right place for this topic (as it’s not where runtime development happens) so I recommend using fdo gitlab instead however there may be nothing new to add which wasn’t already covered in past discussions.

Afaik, the Raspberry PI is now Arm based: link

So it’s a hard no.

Understandable.

At leas now there is more context.